Lyrics

(Peter Cooper/Todd Snider) Well Known Music/SESAC and Nobody's Collecting On These Songs/BMI admin. by BUG Music

Todd and I wrote this after having numerous discussions about the night Bob Dylan called his folk-singing contemporary Phil Ochs “a journalist” and then threw Phil out of his car. That’s the sort of thing we have numerous discussions about over on my side of town. The story is in the song. To our way of thinking, Dylan and Ochs probably both wished everything had played out differently. “If he ever thought better, he thought too late,” is the way we wrote it. We never said who “he” was, because we didn’t have to. My heart goes out to Dylan, wherever he is tonight. And to Phil Ochs, lying in that cold, cold ground.

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Poor Phil Ochs
Sad and low
Hands in his pockets
Wonderin’ where to go
Thrown from the limo
For speaking his mind
Like a red-eyed photo
Into a garbage can
At the corner of Hero and Also-Ran
A fragile heart skipped a fragile beat
It’s warm in the limousine
Cold on the streets of

Thin, wild mercury
And gold lame
Where things will go your way
Or they won’t
Thin wild mercury
And gold lame
You know what they say
Or you don’t

It was all over some new Dylan song
That Phil had the nerve to say sounded wrong
Dylan stopped the car
Words shook like a fist
Phil you’re not a writer, you’re a journalist
Phil you’re not a writer, you’re a journalist
Death of a rebel in a twist of fate
If he ever thought better, he thought too late
Poor Phil Ochs, he slipped through the cracks
Judas went electric and he never looked back on

Thin wild mercury
Or gold lame
Where things will go your way
Or they won’t
Thin wild mercury
And gold lame
You know what they say
Or you don’t
No, you don’t
No, you don’t